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Published: August 18th 2017
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We left New Orleans on Wednesday on a two day schlep up to Memphis.
Around NO (and of course all through The South) there are old plantations and plantation mansions galore, many of which are open to the public. From what we could see most of these focus on the 'grand mansion', plantation owners, southern gals etc. We wanted our focus to be more on those whose work made all those people wealthy - the plantation slaves.
We had seen little reference in NO to slavery, and searching for 'slavery tours' on Google bought up surprisingly little, with the exception of the Whitney Plantation.
Here the focus was very much on looking at plantations and plantation life from the view of the slaves.
The founder, Ambroise Heidel emigrated from Germany, but changed his name to Heydal as it was more 'french' and therefore made him more able to trade with the local French merchants. Initially he grew indigo, for dyes, but as demand waned he switched to sugar cane. For this he needed cheap labour and hence slaves.
Our guide was incredibly knowledgeable, enthusiastic - and probably a bit left wing for Trump's liking.
One
of the reasons this plantation focuses so much on the slaves is that when the current owner, a retired attorney, bought the plantation he found that it was stuffed with documents going back almost to its start as a plantation. He bought it as an investment, but on finding the documents decided to develop it as a memorial to black slave life.
These documents provide great detail to draw upon.
The bald economics were that in the mid 1800s the running costs of the plantation for 1 year were around $15500. The one year profit was around $450000. Based on another fact the guide quoted, that a slave auction at the time had sales of around $50000 being equivalent to $1.5m today, a 30:1 ratio, that puts the profit in today's terms as around $13m, from that 1, not particularly large, plantation. Gawd even knows what they could spend such wealth on. Just put it away and bequeath it.
Around this time more than half of America's millionaires (when a $million was really worth something) lived along either side of the Mississippi in this area on plantations.
That was the bald strokes of the
earning power of a plantation. At an individual slave level, they cost at auction anything up to a few thousand dollars each. Now that, at a 30:1 ratio may sound like a lot but, like a car or a house today, the owners could take out insurance on them, up to 80% of their cost. Lloyds of London was partly built on monies from such insurance. So over a 10 year work span - the average working life of a slave from starting work to death was 10 years, start at age 10 dead by 20, start at 20 dead by 30... the costs of an individual slave, annualised, was relatively small. Effectively there wasn't, with the insurance, any incentive to even aim to keep them alive ad infinitum.
The greatest cause of death was shear hard labour, followed by such things as machete accidents when cutting the crop, animal death (snakes, alligators...), disease. The greatest cause of child mortality - most slave born children didn't live beyond age 2 - was malnutrition because nursing slaves were used as wet nurses for the owner's children. Southern folks thought breastfeeding was animalistic.
If a slave died in the fields
they would most likely be tossed into a ditch. The owners weren't going to use valuable labouring time having the body transported the mile or two back to the slave's home.
In the grounds are a number of memorials to thousands of documented slaves, mostly by a single name only. By law slaves had to be baptised Roman Catholic, but as slaves the Catholic Church didn't allow them to have a family name.
In 1807 slave importation was banned, but slavery itself wasn't. So the female slaves were effectively 'breeders' to help maintain the workforce.
They have several wooden slave quarters on the grounds, some original to the site some relocated in. All wood built - no nails, they could be possible weapons. Mostly of Cypress wood as it is rot proof and termites don't like it. Originally there were up to 22 slave cabins . Two rooms, ground plan around 15 to 20 feet square. Generally housing around 15, but up to 30 during harvest.
In the late 1800s a female owner of the plantation saw the economics a little differently, and started to work a bit harder to keep slaves alive, again driven by
the shortage bought about by the import ban. This owner therefore built a detached kitchen where her cook fed up to 300 people a day. The cook was a very trusted role - so easy to poison the owner and others! They were often the ones in bequests that were left something, and/or set free.
Louisiana's African population increased rapidly in the 1720s and owners sought to establish a power structure to cement enslaved people's place in society. The Code Noir, implemented in 1724, regulated the treatment of slaves. It is sometimes seen as benevolent as it outlaws the selling of children - that is under 10s - from their mothers. But it also gave masters the authority to carry out punishments under the law. Runaways could have their ears cropped, be branded, have hamstrings cut or sentenced to death.
After emancipation in 1865 many freed men had no choice but to stay on plantation where they had been slaves. In 1867 Bradish Johnson bought this plantation and renamed it The Whitney. His earliest records show that dozens of people working the sugar fields had previously been enslaved there.
At Whitney, one of the families who stayed
was that of Victor Haydel, reputedly the illegitimate son of the former slave owner and a slave, and Celestial Becnel. They were legally married in 1871 and by 1880 Victor owned land nearby.
Victor and Celestial were able to provide education for their children - unheard of at the height of slavery when even possessing pencil and paper could be punishable - a value that passed on through the generations. Their great granddaughter, Sybil Haydel, became an educator and Civil Rights leader. She married Ernest Morial, the first African American mayor of New Orleans. Their son, Marc, also became mayor of NO.
Our guide was a decendent of local slaves on his mother's side.
A note/moan here. Many of us will think we know of the heavy 'tip' culture there is in the US. Restaurants here nowadays helpfully show the tip for 18, 20 and 25% of your bill, just for carrying away your order, bringing your food and clearing your plates. Yet today, for our Whitney guide, and for Wendell, our paddle boat guide, both of whom were extremely knowledgeable, researched and must have spent hours/months learning their trade, we were the only ones who tipped
them!!! Go figure.
We did visit 'the house'. Modest to grand, designed to have a flow of air from the Mississippi outside chanelled through an avenue of oaks and then blows through from one side to the other.
On route to our overnight stay in Natchez we detoured slightly to some sites that Simon had identified as actual locations from the story of Solomon Northrup, of 12 Years A Slave, particularly the area around the Bayou Boeuf.
Our overnight was in a Natchez bed and breakfast. Although not an 'antebellum' - that is, pre civil war house - that Natchez is famed for, it did date from around 1880.
More on Natchez and beyond in the next blog.
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